30 Days of Speed
by Qoheleth
Summary: On April 5, 2003, Central City schoolgirl Sarah Palmer provided the Justice League with vital assistance, and as a reward was granted her heart's desire: one month's worth of contact with the Speed Force. This is her story.
1. The Devotee

**Disclaimer: **Whether the DC-Comics characters truly belong to anyone is a debatable question. That they don't belong to me is a certainty.

* * *

Once upon a time, in Central City, Ohio, there was a girl who loved the Flash.

Actually, there were probably several hundred girls in Central City who loved the Flash, but this story is only concerned with one of them. Her name was Sarah Palmer; she was fifteen years old, with dark-brown hair, hazel eyes, and a thoroughly undistinguished scholastic record at Padre Pio Junior High School.

Now, when I say that Sarah loved the Flash, I don't mean that she was _in_ love with him, any more than I would mean that she had romantic thoughts about stallions if I said that she loved horses. There were, no doubt, young women in Central City who daydreamed about having the Scarlet Speedster take them in his arms and whisk them away to his Castle of Speed (not that he had such a thing, but it was a necessary part of the fantasy), but Sarah wasn't among them. Her fascination with the Fastest Man Alive was of a more abstract nature: she collected trinkets and curios with his face on them, she followed his exploits religiously in the _Central City Picture-News_, and she doted on her mother's story of how, as a girl, she had been among the civilians saved by the original Flash in his first battle with the Rogues. In short, she was a member of that unobtrusive but highly active subculture that one social commentator had jocularly dubbed "the Flash-Pack".

Most Flash-Packers had a number of reasons for doing what they did (there was civic pride; there was a general fascination with superheroes attaching itself to the nearest available object; and, as hinted above, there was frequently a touch of romantic passion), but Sarah's motivation was unusually pure and uncomplicated. The Flash, for her, meant one thing and one thing only: the liberation of super-speed, the sheer exhilaration of being free from the limitations of nature. It was much the same impulse that had driven the Wright brothers to invent the airplane – although in Sarah's case it had somewhat the opposite effect, leading her to become discontented with mechanical substitutes for the real experience. Even if an impossibly efficient automobile could have succeeded in breaking the light barrier, she felt, what good would that do her? She still wouldn't get to feel the air moving past her, or her own feet striking the ground as they carried her across the whole Midwest in a matter of seconds. It wouldn't be _her_ who was achieving those astounding speeds, it would be the car – and why, she asked herself reasonably, should a stupid car have more fun than she did?

This was, perhaps, why she had volunteered to serve as lab assistant to the Padre Pio Junior High chemistry teacher. She knew that both Flashes had gained their powers when lightning had struck their lab and a bunch of chemicals had spilled on them, and she secretly hoped that the same thing might happen to her if she spent enough time around Dr. Graham's supply cabinet.

It wasn't a very serious hope, though. She did it because she couldn't bear to miss any opportunity, however slim, to share the Speed Force with her hero, but she knew perfectly well how absurdly the odds were stacked against her. She knew that, short of a miracle, she was destined to spend the rest of her life moving at a maximum speed of roughly 15 miles per hour, just like all the other average humans.

And she accepted that. Life, after all, held innumerable joys that were open even to non-speedsters; even if she couldn't outrun a photon, she could still listen to old rock-and-roll songs, watch the blue jays at her family's bird-feeder, and enthuse with her friends at school about the new football captain's physique. There was no sense in letting a single disappointment darken her entire life, and Sarah Palmer – an intensely sensible young woman – had no intention of doing so. (Although every now and then – especially on afternoons in the middle of summer, when everything around her seemed characterized by an almost intolerable slowness – she would stare at the smiling, red-clad figure in the full-length poster on her door, and she would let out a breath that contained most of the qualities of a wistful sigh, as well as several of those of a sob.)

Such was the life of Sarah Palmer: no different, except in detail, from the lives of a hundred other teenage girls in her city – until one morning in early April, when a chance encounter outside the Attica County Public Library turned her whole world upside down.


	2. Strange Behavior of a Top

The Attica County Library was a grand old building in the finest temple-of-learning tradition, built in the days when the government had had enough money and marble to waste it on something as trivial as books. This was also the era when the original Flash had been a common sight on the streets of Central City, and so, when the budget for the library was being drawn up, some forgotten genius on the city council had proposed allocating an extra few thousand dollars to commission a sculpture of their civic hero to stand beside the front steps. The proposal had been voted through enthusiastically, and the sculptor (also forgotten to history, though quite acclaimed in his day) had added a sly touch of his own by posing the Flash as a replica of Giambologna's "Flying Mercury". Of course, the number of people at the grand unveiling who had actually recognized the reference had been miniscule, but even those who didn't acknowledged that the statue had a fine, classical feel, and thousands of library-goers since then had smiled up at it as they walked past and felt a glow of pride that their city's archive should have such a proud and unique adornment.

Sarah Palmer, needless to say, was hardly content with merely smiling in passing. Whenever she climbed the steps to the library's front doors, she paused beneath the statue and stared at it in silent bliss for as much as a minute. There was no effigy of her hero anywhere in Central City (which was, of course, liberally peppered with effigies of her hero) that so thoroughly expressed, for her, the wonder and beauty of Incarnate Speed.

The April morning on which our story begins was, in this respect, typical. It was a Saturday, and on Saturdays it was Sarah's invariable custom to walk from her house to the library (from which it was only separated by a few blocks) and spend a thoroughly enjoyable hour or so wandering through the stacks of books, pulling random ones off the shelves, curling up with them underneath the huge rose window on the south wall, and losing herself in the great sea that was human learning. At the end of her allotted time, she would frequently check out one or two books that she found intriguing – which, since her tastes were remarkably catholic for a girl of her age, meant that her bedroom had been the temporary lodging-place for a staggering range of thinkers and chroniclers over the course of her youth. Today, for instance, she was returning three books: Søren Kierkegaard's _Repetition_, a collection of _Krazy Kat_ cartoons, and a Lewis Thomas book that Dr. Graham had advised her to read.

She placed these on the rim of the statue's pedestal and gazed up at the carved marble face of the late Barry Allen. Like Giambologna's Mercury, the Scarlet Speedster was portrayed gazing up towards the sky, with his mouth partially open and his eyes almost childishly wide. Yet, somehow – whether it was the genius of the sculptor or the indomitable spirit of the model shining through – one couldn't look at the statue without feeling that here stood a paragon among heroes, an ever-watchful sentinel who, should danger ever threaten the Attica County Library, would drop his pose and be in the thick of the fray in a nanosecond, laying out criminals with his caduceus. Sarah shivered in awe, and leaned against the pedestal in a sort of delighted reverie.

It was not, however, the sort of delighted reverie that left her oblivious to the world around her. Sarah Palmer was rarely oblivious to much of anything (this was one reason why Dr. Graham so valued her services as a lab assistant), and she hadn't been standing there for more than fifteen seconds when she noticed a strange sensation in her right ankle, as though something was repeatedly colliding with it while rotating very fast. She glanced down, and saw a small, black-and-white-striped top spinning at her feet; as she watched, it gave a sort of lurch backwards and then revved forward with all its might, running smack into the side of her brown penny loafer.

Sarah's heart stopped. A top, moving under its own power? A top, behaving in a suspicious fashion outside a public building? Every Central City resident knew the answer to that riddle.

She nearly dashed into the library and told Miss Parrett to phone the police, but some subconscious reservation made her hesitate. It was something about the color; black with a single white stripe wasn't the Top's usual pattern. Of course, he could have changed his color scheme, but that was about as likely as Batman moving to Seattle – and, besides, wasn't the Top supposed to be dead at the moment?

She stood motionless, caught in an agony of indecision, and it was up to the top to make the next move. Apparently, it had realized that Sarah had noticed it, because it was no longer running into her foot; instead, it now began, slowly and painstakingly, to trace a curiously laborious path on the pavement. First it spun itself due south toward the parking lot; then it halted and began traveling northeast in a sort of jagged, staircase-like path that reminded Sarah of her own attempts to draw a diagonal line on an Etch-a-Sketch. Then it halted again and began traveling south again; then northeast again; then south a third time, until it was almost at the edge of the pavement. At which point it began to trace the entire path in reverse: first north, then southwest, then north, then...

With a start, Sarah realized what it was doing. This wasn't just a random zigzag it was tracing on the pavement: it was a lightning bolt. The Flash's lightning bolt.

Everything was clear to her now. The Top must have returned from the dead, and figured out a way to turn human beings into tops. Naturally, he had started with his arch-nemesis – and the Flash had probably traveled all the way from Keystone City, trying to find someone who would help him break the spell or the illusion or whatever it was.

Of course, black with a white stripe wasn't the Flash's color any more than it was the Top's, but Sarah wasn't especially worried about that. Naturally, the Top would have changed the Flash's color so he wouldn't be recognized; in fact, Sarah was a little surprised that he hadn't given him his own green-and-yellow pattern. She wouldn't have thought that any Rogue would have passed up such a golden opportunity of heaping indignity on the Scarlet Speedster – but maybe the Top was possessive about his trademarks.

Anyway, that didn't matter. What was important now was that she come to her hero's aid in his hour of distress. She had been waiting for an opportunity like this all her life; she would never forgive herself if she passed it up now.

"Okay," she said aloud. "You've got my attention. What do you want me to do?"

The top halted in the middle of a diagonal, and began heading directly south, bouncing on the asphalt as it dropped off the pavement onto the parking lot. Sarah picked up her books and followed, her heart beating wildly in her excitement. She felt sure that a landmark of her life was about to be erected – that, for as long as she lived, the events of this day would endure in her memory – that nothing after this would ever be the same.

And about that, at any rate, she was perfectly right.


	3. Water Bearer

As the top steered itself out of the library parking lot and into the crowded Main Street beyond, Sarah felt a twinge of concern. However skillful the Flash might have been at controlling his new form, the fact remained that he didn't have eyes anymore, and to step (or whirl, in this case) blindly into a stream of fast-moving traffic didn't seem like the safest thing to do.

As it turned out, however, her fears were groundless. Maybe the Flash's connection to the Speed Force was informing him of the motion around him, so that he was able to weave between the cars without getting crushed beneath their wheels. Whatever the reason, the top reached the other side of the street safely and quickly – more quickly, in fact, than Sarah, who hesitated for nearly a minute before finding a window in the traffic large enough to dart through.

Once she was across, she followed the top to a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet about three blocks from the library. The top halted in front of the door, apparently waiting for her to open it; she did so, and the top spun into the restaurant, then made a smooth 90-degree turn and headed for the women's bathroom. Its briskness surprised Sarah; she saw, of course, that, since she currently appeared human and the Flash did not, there was only one bathroom open to them, but she would have expected a male superhero of the old school to express some diffidence about having to enter a ladies' room. This one, in contrast, was acting as though he owned the place.

Oh, well, it didn't matter. She opened the restroom door, and the top spun inside and positioned itself under the sink, where it proceeded to engage in a most extraordinary series of abortive leaps. As near as Sarah could make out, it was attempting either to smash through the sink by main force (which was clearly hopeless, since it never got more than three inches off the ground) or to indicate that the sink was in some way important to its plans.

"Should I help you up?" she hazarded.

The top wobbled from side to side in a way that made it look as though it had been out on the tiles the previous night, but which Sarah guessed was intended as a shake of the head.

"Okay, then," she said. "Do you... want some water?"

The wobble this time was in a back-and-forth direction, and Sarah pumped a mental fist in the air. _I'm not so bad at this, when I get started,_ she thought.

Hastily, she went out into the restaurant proper and snagged a cup off the rack by the drink machine; then she ran back into the restroom, filled the cup, and placed it on the floor in front of the top. "Now what?" she said.

But the top was making its head-shaking wobble again. (How it managed to stay on its apex when it was swerving so violently from side to side, Sarah had no idea, but at the moment she had more pressing things to worry about.)

"What do you mean, no?" she said. "You said you wanted water. I got you water. What's the problem?"

The top spun in place for a moment, and seemed to be considering how best to convey the concept in its mind; then it spun forward, stopped about five inches in front of the cup, and began to trace a circle around it about nine inches in diameter.

It took a few seconds for Sarah to decode this gesture. "A bucket?" she said. "You want a _bucket_ of water?"

The top wobbled a nod.

At this point, a lesser girl might have abandoned the project altogether. _After all, _she might have said, _I didn't ask to get involved with this crazy toy; if the kind of help I'm giving isn't good enough for him, he can darn well save the world by himself. _But Sarah Palmer was made of sterner stuff; after heaving a brief but eloquent sigh, she strode back out into the main restaurant and positioned herself in front of the counter. (The reader will recall that it was still only ten in the morning; since few people think of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a breakfast supplier, Sarah was almost the only non-employee in the restaurant.)

After about fifteen seconds, she attracted the attention of a server: a young man of about eighteen, with thatched blond hair and a pallor that suggested either Scandinavian ancestry or too much time spent indoors. "Hey, there," he said, swinging around the oven and assuming a position of great diligence behind the counter. "Can I help you?"

"Maybe," said Sarah. "If I wanted one of those paper buckets your chicken comes in, but without any chicken in it, would that be a problem?"

The boy blinked. "You mean, just the bucket?" he said.

"Just the bucket," Sarah confirmed. (For some reason, an old _Calvin and Hobbes_ cartoon popped into her head: _Nothing's wrong... da dee doo ba... I just want a bucket to hold some... stuff._ She resisted the urge to giggle; Calvin flooding his family's bathroom was _not_ the image she wanted to project right now.)

The boy hesitated for a moment, and appeared to be wrapping his mind around this unaccustomed request. "Okay, then," he said at length, reaching back into the stacks behind the counter and pulling out a paper tub of the requested variety. "One genuine KFC chicken bucket, on the house."

"Thanks," said Sarah.

"Why did you want it, anyway?" said the boy.

Sarah hesitated. "Um... would you believe me if I said I was helping to save the Flash from one of his arch-enemies?"

The boy smiled sardonically. "Probably not."

"Oh," said Sarah. "Well, I guess I can't tell you, then."

And, flashing a cheerful smile at the bewildered young man, she turned away from the counter and carried the bucket into the bathroom.

Ignoring the impatient whirring of the top (she wasn't sure what made a whir impatient, but she could tell that this one was), she stuck the bucket under the faucet and filled it with water. Not all the way to the top, of course, but as full as she could make it and still get it out from under the faucet again.

"I just hope this thing doesn't leak," she said aloud as she balanced the bucket on the edge of the sink. "I just bought these shoes two weeks ago, and I don't think my mom would be thrilled to hear that I've been dumping water all over them."

If the top heard this, it gave no sign. Instead, it spun a little ways backwards and to the left, and began making the same abortive hops underneath the soap dispenser that it had previously made under the sink.

This caused Sarah a whole new set of problems. If her guide wanted a bucket of _soapy_ water, the obvious way to get it was to hold the bucket under the soap dispenser and just squirt soap into it – but that, Sarah knew, was beyond her capacities. If both her hands were occupied in holding the bucket (and she wasn't nearly strong enough to hold a KFC chicken bucket full of water with one hand), the only way she could press down the lever on the soap dispenser was with her nose – and, while she was willing to do a lot to assist her hero, there she drew the line.

Of course, she could have simply gone back out to the counter and found someone to hold the bucket for her – but, apart from not being eager to go through that whole experience again, she was reluctant to share her mission with anyone else. She had felt from the beginning that this was _her_ moment, _her_ opportunity to do the Flash a great service; if she asked someone's help, it wouldn't be as special. She was aware that this was a slightly childish feeling, and was secretly a little embarrassed by it, but she let it guide her actions anyway (a decision that, some weeks later, she would come to regard as providential).

The solution she eventually came to was to hold the bucket steady on the sink with her right hand while, through a dexterous application of thumb and fingers, she squirted a puddle of soap onto her left hand, and then to swish her left hand around in the bucket until the soap had thoroughly mingled with the water. She repeated this process several times, until she had worked up a nice lather in the bucket; then she heaved the bucket off the sink and presented it to the top, lifting the latter up briefly so it could inspect the bucket's contents.

"Satisfactory?" she said as she put it down again.

The top wobbled a nod, then spun past Sarah and made its way for the restroom door, where it stopped and spun in place expectantly. Sarah picked up the bucket, cradled it in her arms, and went over and shoved the door open with her buttocks (in the process sloshing soapy water all over her skirt, her socks, and, yes, her shoes). Together, the two of them exited the restaurant, and Sarah followed the top back down the sidewalk and across the street to the Attica County Library.

* * *

By the time they reached the Flash's statue again, Sarah's entire lower body was a sopping mass of suds. Besides the spillage that had occurred both times she had opened a door for the top, it had turned out that the bucket did indeed leak – not much, but a drop every five yards or so adds up over three blocks. Furthermore, although the top had been able, with the aid of gravity, to get down the marble steps of the library on its way out, it turned out to be completely unequipped to climb those same steps on its way back in; Sarah had been obliged to put down the bucket and carry the top up the steps, then come back, pick the bucket back up, and carry _it_ up the steps, all of which had added perhaps another cup of water to the small pond on her skirt.

Despite all this activity, however, there was still a gallon or more of water in the bucket when Sarah and the top arrived at the forgotten artist's Giambologna-esque effigy of the Scarlet Speedster. Sarah, of course, still had no idea what she was supposed to do with this water, but, after all the effort it had taken to get it there, she certainly hoped it was something important.

The top spun up to the base of the statue, and whirred in place for a moment as though pondering; then, abruptly, it revved itself forwards and rammed itself with all its might against the statue's marble base.

Sarah let out a small, involuntary yelp, thinking that her guide must surely have injured itself after such a violent collision with such hard stone. She had, however, reckoned without the durability of plastic; apart from a moment's disorientation, the top appeared to be completely unharmed by its action. Indeed, it repeated it two or three times, and Sarah eventually realized that this was another gesture indicating what she was required to do.

"Hitting the base of the statue," she said. "Does that mean that I'm supposed to throw the water at the base of the statue?"

The top wobbled a negation, and introduced a slight variation into its next collision. Instead of simply spinning along the ground, it made one of its small hops just before it hit the pedestal; it still didn't reach much higher than the lowest line of engraving, but it conveyed the necessary idea.

"Higher?" said Sarah. "So I'm supposed to throw it at the statue itself?"

A back-and-forth tumble confirmed this speculation. With a deep breath, Sarah stepped between the statue and a pillar, so that her act of vandalism (as it would probably be construed by an uninformed witness) would be seen by as few people as possible; then she lifted the bucket to her shoulder, and, with all her might, heaved its contents onto the Flash's marble body.

As soon as the water touched the stone, there was a loud bang, and a cloud of blue smoke emerged that temporarily blinded Sarah to everything around her. It lasted perhaps fifteen seconds, and then it cleared – and when it cleared, a tall, slender form was lying prone on the pavement in front of the statue.

It was not, however, the form that Sarah had expected. She was far from being a general expert on superheroes – her devotion to the Flash was too specific for that – but anyone with even a glancing familiarity with the Justice League could recognize the figure in front of her. The raven hair, the dapper black suit, and particularly the fishnet stockings, told the story: it was none other than Zatanna, the legendary Maid of Magic.


	4. Spells Broken, Spells Cast

When Sarah found her voice, the first words to tumble out of her mouth were, "You're not the Flash."

Zatanna smiled tiredly. "Sorry to disappoint you," she said. "I would have traced my own symbol on the pavement, only I don't really have..."

She broke off, and glanced sharply towards the parking lot. Sarah followed her gaze, and saw a bearded man of about forty, whom she recognized as one of the local police constables, heading towards the Flash's statue with the look of a man who has seen something curious and intends to get to the bottom of it.

Zatanna frowned, and raised her right hand. "_Ydobemos S'esle Melborp!_" she said, in a tone so thunderous and awful that Sarah half expected the man to burst into flames on the spot.

This, however, did not happen. Instead, the man paused, shook his head, and turned around and made his way to his car without a backward glance.

Sarah turned to the legendary enchantress with a quizzical look. "What was that all about?" she said.

Zatanna grinned. "One of my personal specialties," she said. "A spell of disinterest. Under ordinary circumstances, of course, anyone who saw the explosion just now would want to come over and ask for a full explanation – and, for that matter, most people who saw a Justice League member standing around in front of a public building would usually want an autograph. Now, however, with the spell of disinterest around the two of us, anyone who sees us talking will not only ignore us completely, but will forget our very existence as soon as we're out of earshot."

"Oh," said Sarah. "Um... why?"

"Privacy," said Zatanna. "I have a lot to thank you for, and I'd rather not do it surrounded by paparazzi."

Sarah blushed. "Oh, it wasn't that big a deal," she said.

"It certainly was," said Zatanna. "If it hadn't been for you, the Justice League would have been incapacitated for the next twenty-four hours, and Medusa would have been able to have her way with the world's leaders."

When she put it that way, Sarah had to admit that it did sound like a big deal. "Who's Medusa?" she said.

"A young witch from upstate Massachusetts with a severe Napoleon complex," said Zatanna. "Her real name is Laurel Dommert, but she started calling herself Medusa after she discovered a way to enchant people into statues – not to _turn_ them into statues, you understand, but to imprison them in statues that were already there. She was tremendously proud of this accomplishment, and decided to use it to take over the world: every national capital has an abundance of statues that she could capture its leaders in, and surely some of them would be willing to cede control of their militaries to her in exchange for not being slowly dismembered with a chisel."

Sarah shuddered.

"But, of course," Zatanna continued, "before she could do that, she had to take care of those pesky superheroes in the Justice League, who get paid by the American people to frustrate just this sort of scheme. So, somehow (I'm still not sure exactly how), she managed to forge a letter to me from the Flash, asking me to meet him in front of the Central City library at seven o'clock this morning; then she met me instead, and trapped me in this statue." (She tapped the Flash sculpture with a long, pointed fingernail.) "I suppose she then went and trapped Superman in a statue of me, and so on with everyone in the Justice League – except Batman, maybe. I've never heard of there being a statue of Batman anywhere, and frankly I can't imagine him ever posing for one, so she might have left him alone."

"Where is there a statue of _you_?" Sarah asked. She'd never heard of any grateful metropolis paying tribute to the Maid of Magic in such a way.

Zatanna laughed. "Madame Tussauds, believe it or not," she said. "Right next to the one of Houdini."

"Oh." That made sense. "So this Medusa person could just waft herself to London and nail Superman, then to Metropolis and nail Green Lantern, and so on? And then, once she had taken care of everyone in the League, she could waft herself to Washington and start enchanting senators into the statues there?"

"That was her plan," said Zatanna. "But now, of course, thanks to your invaluable assistance, it won't work quite the way she planned."

"But what did I do?" said Sarah. "And what was the deal with the top, anyway?" She glanced down at the base of the statue; the top was still there, but now it was lying on one side, completely devoid of any locomotive power.

"Ah, yes, the top," said Zatanna with a smile. "We got lucky there. You see, although I had no idea who Medusa was when she came out from behind that bush over there –" she pointed to an ornamental juniper bush about three yards from where Sarah was standing "– I can recognize a hostile magician when she pulls a wand on me, and I instinctively started to shout '_Pots!_' so as to make her freeze in her tracks. Unfortunately, she was a little quicker than I was, and I only managed to get out the first three letters before her spell nailed me in the chest."

"'_Pot_'," said Sarah.

"Exactly," said Zatanna. "But, as luck would have it, that happens to be a word spelled backward in its own right, and so my abortive spell caused a top to appear next to the base of the statue. I don't think Medusa even noticed – she was too busy gloating over my defeat, and spelling out how she was going to conquer the Earth while I was imprisoned in marble – but it meant that I now had a prosopon that wasn't trapped the way I was."

"Prosopon?" Sarah queried.

"A tool that's also an extension of the user," said Zatanna. "Like a paintbrush to a painter, or a human host to Starro – or the Flash to the Speed Force, I suppose. Anyway, the point is that I had something that I could work through. It wasn't much of a something, admittedly, but, if I could use it to communicate with another person, that person might be able to put together a bucket of soap and water to break Medusa's spell. And, sure enough, you did."

"But why soap and water?" Sarah asked.

"Because that's one of the oldest methods of dispelling black magic," said Zatanna. "It's mentioned in any good textbook on the subject." (Sarah had a mental image of a teen-aged, acne-ridden sorceress picking up her copy of _Scrying for Beginners_ at the college bookstore.) "I only hope the people at Madame Tussauds don't mind when I try to fling it on one of their exhibits; you know how touchy museum curators can get sometimes."

She stood up and brushed the dust off her suit. "Well, I suppose I shouldn't waste time in finding out," she said. "For all I know, Medusa could be in Washington – or Peking or Baghdad – at this very moment." She turned to Sarah. "Once again, thank you so much for your help. On behalf of the Justice League of America, I can promise you that we'll never forget this."

Sarah blushed hotly. "Oh, that's okay," she said. "I mean, it's just what anybody would have done, wouldn't they?"

"You'd be surprised," said Zatanna. Her face darkened for a moment, causing a shiver to go down Sarah's spine; then she sighed, and shook her head. "Well, _bon voyage._"

She took a deep breath, presumably to speak the spell that would teleport her to England, and Sarah suddenly realized that there was one thing she'd forgotten to ask her. "Oh, before you go, Lady Zatanna..." she said.

Zatanna turned back to her. "Yes?"

Sarah bent down and picked up the top from where it lay beside the statue. "Can I keep this?"

Zatanna stared at her for a full quarter of a minute, then put a hand over her mouth and burst out laughing. Sarah was a little nettled (was there something funny about wanting a souvenir of the day you saved the Justice League?), but her good breeding, along with the reflection that it wasn't wise to tick off someone who could reduce you to ash with a single word, kept her from saying anything.

After a minute or so, the Maid of Magic recovered herself somewhat. "Oh, dear," she said breathlessly. "I'm sorry, Miss..."

Sarah gave her name.

"...Miss Palmer." Zatanna pronounced the word thoughtfully, as though it were somehow significant to her. "I wasn't laughing at you; I was laughing at myself. To think that I was about to just whisk myself off to London and leave the person who freed me from Medusa's spell with nothing but a top for her trouble!"

Sarah blinked. "Well, I wasn't expecting anything else..." she began.

"No, of course not," said Zatanna. "But what you don't realize – and what I'd completely forgotten in my focus on catching Medusa – is that to release a magician from the spell that another magician has put on her is to place her under one of the greatest debts that one human being can owe to another. If you were an enchantress yourself, I would now be bound to your service until one of us died; since you aren't, the rules aren't that strict, but I am still obliged to do you one favor before I leave."

"What favor?" said Sarah.

"Anything you like," said Zatanna. "For instance, maybe there's a dress, or a book, that you've been pining after for ages but could never afford: just say the word, and I can conjure up a perfect copy of it to be all your own. Or maybe you'd prefer that I undid the death of a favorite pet, or took away a memory that you'd rather not have. Whatever your heart's desire is, I am honor-bound to grant it if it's at all possible for me – and the odds that it isn't," she added with a smile, "are somewhat slim."

For a moment, Sarah was unable to respond. The notion that the most powerful member of the Justice League had suddenly become her own personal genie was too much for her mind to process on top of everything else that had happened that morning; she stared vacantly at the Maid of Magic for perhaps fifteen seconds, and might have continued to stare for some time if Zatanna hadn't coughed gently. "Miss Palmer," she said, "if you're going to make a request of me, I'd appreciate it if you did so quickly. So long as Medusa is still at liberty, every second is precious."

Slowly, Sarah's brain began to work again. All right, so Zatanna was offering to give her whatever she most wanted in the world. What was that?

Well, to go to heaven when she died, of course, but she didn't think that Zatanna could do much about that. In terms of _earthly_ goods, what did she want most? For the second time that day, a _Calvin and Hobbes_ strip flashed through her mind: "Think BIG! Riches! Power! Pretend you could have ANYthing!"

This, however, was not something Sarah Palmer was good at. It wasn't that she didn't have the acquisitive impulse: she could quite easily blow an entire week's allowance at any dollar store in the nation. When it came to really ambitious greed, however, she was generally completely helpless.

Nor had Zatanna's suggestions helped her any: she had no memories that she really wanted to get rid of, her cat Thunderbolt still had several years left in him by the veterinarian's reckoning, and she couldn't think of any dress or book that she coveted enough to waste her one magic wish on it. In fact, she couldn't think of anything that her heart longed for to that extent – until, looking vaguely about her for inspiration, she caught sight of the Flash's statue.

_Oh,_ she thought. _Duh._

She whirled back to face the Maid of Magic. "Can you put me in contact with the Speed Force?"

To say that Zatanna was surprised would be an understatement. Her delicately chiseled jaw dropped a good three inches, and it took her a second or two to gather her wits enough to say, "I'm sorry?"

"The Speed Force," Sarah repeated. "I want you to make me its proso-whatever-it-was, like the Flash. That's my request."

Zatanna took a deep breath. "Miss Palmer, you don't realize what you're asking," she said. "There's an unwritten rule in the Justice League that one member never meddles in another member's domain unless the other member asks him to; that's why the Martian Manhunter has never read the Riddler's mind from a distance and telepathed Batman the answer to his latest puzzle. If the Flash found out that I'd been using magic on the Speed Force..."

"You wouldn't be," said Sarah. "You'd be using it on me, to _connect_ me with the Speed Force. The Speed Force itself wouldn't be affected, any more than the force of gravity is affected when you roll a pair of dice."

Zatanna hesitated. "Well, no, I suppose not," she said. "Still, I don't think the Flash would appreciate it if someone else with his powers started running around Central City. He's very protective of the Flash persona – out of respect for his predecessor, you know – and I'm pretty sure he'd consider another speedster living right next door to be a threat to his uniqueness."

Sarah thought about that. She certainly didn't want to set herself up as a rival to her lifelong hero – but, on the other hand, this was the opportunity she'd been waiting for all her life, and she'd hate herself forever if she passed it up.

"What if it wasn't permanent?" she suggested. "Say you arranged it so that I could use the Speed Force for a month, and then at the end of the month I would go back to being an ordinary human. Would that be okay?"

Zatanna seemed interested. "You think that would satisfy you?" she said.

"Sure," said Sarah, ignoring a passing pang of regret. "No point in getting greedy, is there?"

Zatanna laughed. "No, perhaps not," she said. "All right, let's see. Today's the fifth of April, and it's –" she paused to check the clock on the nearby Lutheran church's spire "– about half past ten. So the spell that I put on you now will last until half past ten on May 5. Sound good?"

"It sounds great," said Sarah.

"All right, then," said Zatanna. She thought for a moment, her lips moving soundlessly as though she were rehearsing various wordings; then she took a deep breath and proclaimed, "_Haras Remlap, eb a ssertsdeeps rof ytriht syad!_"

As she pronounced the last word, Sarah felt a strange sensation sweep over her. It was, first and foremost, a sensation of boundless vigor; she felt quite sure that, at that moment, she could run halfway around the world and never stop for breath. But mixed up with this, strangely enough, was a note of serenity, even of stillness, as though the force to which she was now connected was the conclusion of all motion as well as its source. Sarah had once read somewhere that motion at infinite speed was the same thing as rest, but the idea had never seemed real to her until now.

She turned her head and looked towards the street. The scene was the same as it had always been – cars, pedestrians, the occasional pigeon fluttering from lamppost to lamppost – but now she was looking at it through the Speed Force, and so all was changed. The cars that had seemed to zip by so fast now appeared to be moving at a snail's pace, while the people and the pigeons were all but frozen in their places; Sarah found herself almost pitying them, though she knew that she herself had been just like them not fifteen seconds before. What was even stranger, though, was the way her other senses had been heightened: she could feel every vibration within twenty yards through the wind on her face, and she thought that, if she concentrated hard enough, she could estimate the speed at which the Earth was moving about the Sun from the miniscule corrections she was making to her sense of balance.

Then, with the tiniest movement of her will – like the refocusing of one's eyes that causes one to stop seeing a Magic Eye picture – she switched off this Speed-Force-resonant mode in herself, and the universe reverted to normality. Awestruck, she turned to Zatanna, who was leaning against a nearby pillar with a pleased smile on her face.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"My pleasure," said Zatanna. "And now, if you'll excuse me, I really must fly. _Ot Emadam Sduassut!_"

And, with that, the Maid of Magic vanished into thin air, and Sarah was left alone in front of the library. For a few minutes, she stood stock-still in her place, letting the reposeful celerity of the Speed Force insinuate itself into every nook and cranny of her being – a practice from which she was interrupted only when a voice behind her said, "Um... hello?"

She turned around, and saw a girl about her own age standing next to the Flash's statue with a quizzical look on her face. It seemed that Zatanna's "spell of disinterest" had stopped working when Zatanna had left, and Sarah supposed that she had been making herself rather conspicuous by standing in front of a public building with her eyes closed and her arms extended, as though she were John Carter waiting to be sucked up to Mars.

"Hi," she said, with what she hoped was a reassuring smile.

The girl didn't seem especially reassured. "Are you okay?" she said, with an expression that could have been taken as solicitous or just nervous.

Sarah's smile widened as she nodded. "I'm wonderful," she said. "Thanks for asking."


	5. Enter Sparkle

Mrs. Palmer glanced up from the television as her daughter entered the den. "Hello, Sarah," she said. "Did you have a nice time at the library?"

"Terrific," said Sarah with a smile.

"Well, that's good," said her mother. "There's some chicken from last night in the fridge; you can warm that up for lunch – if your brother hasn't already polished them off, that is."

"Sounds good," said Sarah. She meant it, too; she hadn't realized until now how hungry she was. Evidently her metabolism was faster now, too – or maybe it was just that she had had a small breakfast that morning.

"What do you have this on for?" she added, glancing at the television. "I thought you hated _Profiler_."

Her mother sighed. "I do," she said. "I'm just waiting for the figure-skating tournament to come on. It's amazing how little is on network television at half past noon on a..."

She broke off, suddenly, as Jamie Luner's face on the screen was replaced by an enormous image of the CBS eye, and a deep voice intoned, "We interrupt this program for a special CBS news bulletin. Here now is Dan Rather."

"Good afternoon," said the venerable Southern anchorman, with an expression on his face that was as close to cheerfulness as Sarah had ever seen him come. "An attempted conquest of the United States, and possibly the world, was foiled this morning when the Justice League of America apprehended the sorceress Medusa outside the National Statuary Hall. Bob Schieffer reports from Washington with the story."

"Well, what do you know about that?" said Mrs. Palmer, as CBS News's Washington correspondent appeared on the screen and began to relate the circumstances of Medusa's capture. "Medusa... I don't think I've ever heard of that one before."

"She must be new," said Sarah with a shrug. "Or maybe she's a minor enemy of Wonder Woman, or somebody. The minor Leaguers probably have a zillion enemies we've never heard of." (Every member of the Justice League who wasn't the Flash was a "minor Leaguer" in Sarah's eyes.)

"Could be," Mrs. Palmer agreed. "Certainly the name would fit. Wonder Woman's always fighting characters out of Greek myth, isn't she?

"Oh, look, it's the hussy," she added, as Zatanna's face appeared on the screen. (This was the way Mrs. Palmer always referred to Zatanna, as a way of expressing disapproval of her taste in stockings. There was no hostility in it; she seemed to view it as a perfectly ordinary descriptive term, just as she seemed to find nothing exceptionable in identifying Newman's Own, by virtue of its donating a small percentage of its earnings to Planned Parenthood, as "the baby-killer's salad dressing".)

Sarah didn't reply, but stared with renewed interest at the screen. Zatanna appeared to be responding to a question from Schieffer; with a twinkle in her eye, she said, "Yes, it was a pretty narrow thing. If we hadn't had a couple strokes of very good luck, I think the planet Earth might be in serious trouble right now." And she turned her head the smallest fraction of a radian, and winked at the camera – not obviously, but you couldn't miss it if you were watching for it.

Sarah felt a _frisson_ of delight go down her spine, but the expression on her face remained one of bland interest. "Well, it's a good thing the Justice League is lucky, then," she said. "I'll go warm up that chicken now, Mom."

* * *

Later that evening, as Sarah was undressing for bed, it occurred to her to wonder why she hadn't told her mother – or anyone else, for that matter – about her new power. The news flash about Medusa's capture had been the first of half a dozen occasions that afternoon when it would have been perfectly natural to say, "Oh, by the way, did I mention that Zatanna gave me the gift of super-speed this morning?" Yet, somehow, it hadn't even occurred to her to reveal it. It was as though some primal superhero-buff instinct had told her that superpowers are by nature secret – that half the Flash's mystique would be lost if anyone could come up to him while he was in civilian garb and say, "Hey there, Jake (or Mitch or Elwyn or whatever), how're the tachyons hanging?"

As she carried this idea to its logical conclusion, she laughed aloud. Did she mean to say that she was protecting a secret identity? That, now that she had a superpower, she was planning on becoming a superheroine? But that was ridiculous; she hadn't had any such idea when she made the request. All she had wanted was to know that exhilarating freedom that she had spent the past fifteen years fantasizing about; the notion of apprehending burglars or rescuing runaway trains, or any of the other things the Flash did with his own super-speed, hadn't even entered her head.

_Oh, really?_ said another part of her mind – her conscience, she supposed._ You mean to tell me that you expected to spend the rest of April in one big orgy of self-indulge__nce, without even considering whether someone who can transcend the normal laws of physics might have certain obligations to the public weal? Really, Sarah, I expected better of you._

When she put it like that, it was hard for her to argue. Not that she was particularly eager to go _mano a mano_ with Captain Boomerang, but she could recognize the call of duty when she heard it. Of course, she had no idea how she was going to gather all the necessary accoutrements of a secret identity – where, for instance, was she going to get a costume? – but she supposed she would have to manage.

She sighed, and reached behind her back to unhook her bra – and then blinked in puzzlement as her fingers, instead of touching plastic and cotton, made contact with some cool, smooth substance that she couldn't even begin to identify. She glanced down at herself, and was startled to find that her entire body, from neck to wrists to ankles, was sheathed in a form-fitting silver costume emblazoned with a multi-colored shooting star across the bust.

She almost laughed aloud as she realized: evidently she wasn't the only person who instinctively thought of secret identities when she thought of superpowers. Zatanna, it seemed, had had the same idea (which was odd, since, as far as she knew, Zatanna didn't have a secret identity herself), and had thoughtfully provided her with the necessary apparel to begin her heroic career – either as part of the original spell, or (more likely) as an afterthought later in the day. And, because the costume fit her so perfectly and naturally, Sarah hadn't even noticed when it materialized around her; indeed, she could barely tell she was wearing it now.

She reached down, picked up her skirt, and thrust a hand into its right-hand pocket. Sure enough, she withdrew a mask and a pair of gloves of the same fabric as the costume, along with a pair of toe shoes (at least that was what they looked like, although the soles were tougher than most ballerinas would have cared for) and a silver-colored hair scrunchie with a small, metallic shooting star sewn onto it. Sarah wondered for a moment why this last item had been included, but then she realized that it made sense; when she had started wearing her hair loose instead of in pigtails, back when she had turned eleven, how many friends and teachers had said, "Good heavens, I almost didn't recognize you"? If she wore a ponytail as well with a mask when she fought crime, her anonymity would be doubly guaranteed. (She wondered whether Zatanna had learned this trick from one of her fellow League heroines; maybe Black Canary wore her hair in a bun when she wasn't on duty.)

_Well, might as well see what the whole thing looks like,_ she thought. She slipped on the mask and gloves (which molded themselves to her body as gracefully as the costume had) and tied her hair back with the scrunchie; then, not without some trepidation, she opened her closet door and looked in the full-length mirror inside.

For some moments, she stood motionless, refusing to believe what she saw. A small, elegant figure, glistening and enigmatic in the dim light of her table lamp, stared out of the glass at her, its form and posture suggesting a reclusive but powerful sprite newly emerged from some enchanted forest. She knew, intellectually, that it was her (and, if she concentrated, she could make out her features in the part of the face that wasn't covered), but the immediate and overwhelming impression was that she was looking at an exotic, glamorous stranger. Clearly, Zatanna had known what she was doing when she had conjured this outfit.

Sarah laughed. "Now all you need is a name," she said to her reflection. "Let's see, how about..."

Her voice trailed off; she wasn't sure what she wanted to call herself. Of course, if she had acquired Superman's powers, it would have been easy; the only hard part would have been figuring out whether she was the third or the fourth person to bear the "Supergirl" name. But how did you adapt that principle to "the Flash"? "Girl Flash"? "She-Flash"? "Flashette"?

No. Even if her hero's name had lent itself more readily to feminization, adopting it would have missed the point: the girl in front of her might be a complement to the Flash, but she was in no way a copycat. She needed a name that was her own.

_Turbogirl?_ Too corny.

_Acceleratrix?_ Too hard to spell.

_Photonna, the Human Light Particle?_ Gag.

She shook her head; this was the wrong way to go about it. She was thinking only in terms of names that suggested speed. "The Flash" didn't just suggest speed; it suggested light. Therefore brightness, beauty, and clarity. She wouldn't have felt the same way about the Flash if he had called himself "Turboman".

_Okay, then,_ she thought, _if light flashes, what else does it do?_ And the answer came immediately:_ It sparkles._

"Sparkle," she murmured aloud. "Sparkle, the Silver Speedstress." She grinned puckishly, causing the girl in the mirror to look very Sparkly indeed. "Yeah, I like that. Sparkle it is."

And, having thus selected the name that would grace the headlines of the _Central City Picture-News_ for most of the rest of April, she removed her accessories and concealed them carefully in her underwear drawer; then she threw on a cotton nightgown that covered her costume proper, said a quick prayer, and hopped into bed, where she drifted off to sleep while making eager plans for her 30 days of speed.

* * *

**Author's note:** _To forestall a possible boycott among the five people who are actively following this story, I should clarify that the Newman's Own Foundation does not support Planned Parenthood_ now_. At the time this story is set, it did, but it removed PP from its beneficiary list in 2006 due to complaints from its customers, so you loyal pro-lifers in the audience can continue to purchase Sockarooni spaghetti sauce with a clear conscience._


	6. First Task

**Day 1 – April 7, 2003**

Sarah was naturally an early riser, and it was around six-thirty the next morning when she became aware of the world around her once again. Her first impulse was to get up and start preparing for school, but then she remembered that it was a weekend.

_Yes, that's right,_ she thought. _It's Sunday. Yesterday was Saturday, because I went to the library in the morning…_

And, with that thought, all the events of the previous day came back to her in a rush. Yes, she had gone to the library; she had met Zatanna; she had helped save the world; she had gotten a wish granted; and now, for the next 700 hours – oh, wonder of wonders – she was Sparkle.

Slowly, cautiously, she sat up in her bed and reached out to the Speed Force with her mind. Yes, there it was: the source of all motion, the Engine at Heartspring's Center, there at her command. From now until St. Benedicta's Day, the two of them could not be separated – and the thought was such a delight to her that she felt she would explode if she didn't tell it aloud.

The next moment she was standing in front of her mirror, grinning at the unassuming young woman reflected therein. "My name's Sarah Palmer," she whispered. "I'm the fastest girl alive."

It wasn't much, but it satisfied her. With a contented sigh, she whisked herself back into bed, and remained there for the next half-hour, drifting in and out of pleasant hypnopompiae, until her father came up to rouse her for church.

* * *

The morning passed uneventfully – too uneventfully, to Sarah's taste. Now that she had the gift of super-speed, she wanted opportunities to use it; the ordinary Sunday-morning routine of breakfast, shower, preparations for church, church, obligatory social activities after church, and back home to rest and think holy thoughts for the rest of the day, didn't seem to her to provide nearly enough scope for her new abilities. She wanted excitement, she wanted adventure, she wanted to live life at a master tempo – and she wanted it as soon as possible. After all, she only had a month.

God, it has been said, has two bad habits with respect to people's prayers – not granting them being one, and granting them being the other. In this case, it was the latter tendency that He chose to indulge: as Sarah was lying on her bed at around 2:00 that afternoon, dutifully reading John Paul II's exhortations to the Secular Institutes, the radio station that she was listening to (WDYP 97.7, "The Retro Rocket", Central-Keystone City's First Choice for Classic Rock – Sarah's taste in music was as determinedly old-school as her taste in superheroes) interrupted "Leaving on a Jet Plane" with an emergency news bulletin.

"Good afternoon," said the briskly tense voice of the 78&6 News reporter. "Claudia Key Anthony here, coming to you live from downtown Central City, where the West Tower of the Castle Museum is currently being engulfed by fire."

That got Sarah's attention. The Castle Museum was a major Central City landmark; the city's premier art gallery, it had been financed in the 1930s by an eccentric local grain titan, one of whose stipulations had been that the building be designed to look like a medieval castle, complete with turrets, moat, and drawbridge. It couldn't be denied that this bit of whimsy had had a highly beneficial effect on the cultural life of Central City; more children visited the Castle each weekend than any other art museum in America, and the city's populace was, as a result, quite astonishingly conversant with classical painting and sculpture. (It was while viewing an exhibit in the Castle that that forgotten sculptor had conceived the notion of representing the Flash as the "Flying Mercury".)

Sarah reached down quickly (which, for her, now meant in under a nanosecond) and twisted the volume knob on her radio. Claudia Key Anthony's voice gained four decibels as she continued, "I'm here with Karen F. Smith, the Castle's curator. Tell us, ma'am, does anyone know what started the fire?"

"Not an inkling," said Mrs. Smith. (Sarah winced to hear the sadness in her voice; she had always been fond of the plump, cheerful museum curator.) "But of course, in a building this old, there's a hundred things that can start a fire if even a small spark is left unattended. A short in the wiring, a cigarette that wasn't put out properly, a piece of glassware that happened to be in just the right place to focus a sunbeam – it could have been anything."

"I see," said Anthony. "And what about the effects? How much damage is this fire likely to do?"

Mrs. Smith sighed. "More than I like to think about," she said. "None of the main collections were in the West Tower, but we kept a lot of miscellaneous pieces there that didn't seem to fit anywhere else. There were some medieval ivories, some Oriental pieces, a number of African things – I can't remember them all, but every one of them was valuable. And none of them was flameproof."

"Has anyone contacted the Flash?" Anthony asked. "I know he's in Washington right now, wrapping up yesterday's Medusa case with the rest of the JLA, but he still should be able to get here in time."

"We've tried," said Mrs. Smith, "but, by this point, I doubt he would be able to help much. The West Tower stairway entrance collapsed about ten minutes ago, and, the way the fire's progressed, I don't think the Tower would hold his weight if he tried to run up the wall. If anyone much over 100 pounds gets up there, he's in trouble."

"I see," said Anthony. "Well, thank you very much, Mrs. Smith." And she redirected her attention to the listening audience, which had just become smaller by one 93-pound speedstress. "So there you have it. It's a sad day for Central City's art lovers; we can only hope that…" She paused. "Just a moment… does anyone else hear that?"

The crowd around her, which hitherto had been buzzing with the usual noise of a crowd gathered about a calamity, suddenly paused at these words and listened. Sure enough, a faint hum could be heard in the distance – a hum well known to the people of Central City: the sound of someone running at the rate of several hundred footsteps per second.

"Well, what do you know?" said Anthony. "Looks like the Flash managed to make it after all."

"Not exactly," said a young woman's voice, as the hum abruptly ceased. "The name's Sparkle. I understand you could use some help out here?"

* * *

Despite the hour or so she had spent honing her powers on the previous day, Sarah had still expected to have some trouble getting from her house to the Castle in a matter of minutes. Once she got moving, however, it amazed her that she had ever worried. Of course she could read street signs while whizzing past them at 500 mph; of course she could dodge a city's worth of cars and pedestrians. When you let the Speed Force guide you, it was the most natural thing in the world.

That was one of the reasons she took a detour to the north side of the city before heading for the Castle. Partially, of course, she figured that it would protect her secret identity if she never seemed to emerge from the same part of the city twice – but she also just wanted to savor the experience for as long as she could. A few extra seconds wouldn't make much difference to the fire (at least, she hoped they wouldn't), but, to her, they were like hours of bliss.

But all good things must end, even in the Speed Force. Within a minute, she had arrived at the burning museum, and there was nothing for it but to slow to a halt and introduce herself. "My name's Sparkle. I understand you could use some help out here?"

Claudia Key Anthony seemed to have been rendered momentarily speechless by the appearance of a petite teenage girl in silver where she had expected a full-grown man in red, and it was Mrs. Smith who volunteered, "Well, if you think you can get into the West Tower without hurting yourself, yes, we'd love your help. But, if you don't mind my asking, my dear, um… well, maybe I've just been avoiding newspapers too long, but I don't seem to remember anyone called Sparkle in our register of local heroes."

"No, you wouldn't," said Sarah. "This is kind of my first time out. I hope that's not a problem."

"Oh, no, not at all," said Mrs. Smith. "We all have to start somewhere, don't we?"

There was just the faintest note of hesitancy in her voice, as though she would have preferred the fate of her West Tower collection not to rest on the shoulders of a green-as-grass teenage speedstress. Sarah noticed this hesitation, but chose to ignore it. "Yes, I suppose we do," she said. "By the way, if you don't mind my asking, do you know what the Castle's roof is made of?"

Mrs. Smith hesitated. "Um… slate tile, I believe. Why?"

Sarah frowned, her chem-lab assistant's mind going into overdrive. As a lifelong Flash-Packer, she knew all about the two ways that a speedster could get through a solid barrier: she could either change her vibrational pattern so that she became insubstantial relative to the roof, or bore a hole in the roof by rubbing it at super-speed. The former, though, was one of the more advanced Speed-Force techniques, and, the denser the barrier, the trickier it was; Sarah's experiments of the previous day had gotten her to the point where she was comfortable vibrating through wood (that was how she had managed to leave her house without leaving her room), but anything more than that was beyond her capacities at this point. And the latter, of course, depended entirely on relative hardnesses. The Flash, it was widely believed, had incorporated ruby dust into his costume, which not only made him look more impressive but also enabled him to drill through anything short of diamond; it was a neat trick, but Sarah doubted that Zatanna (who, after all, wasn't a speedstress herself) had thought to include it when she'd conjured up the Sparkle costume. (She raised a hand to the light to check this. Nope, no gleam of crystal there.) If she tried to bore through slate, she would in all likelihood end up grinding her hand rather than the roof.

If only she had a tool of some kind to help her. Something hard enough to wear down anything: diamonds, or corundum, or…

She blinked, and mentally kicked herself. _Duh, Sarah, _she thought. _You're standing in front of an art museum._

"Excuse me a moment," she said to Mrs. Smith, and raced through the open door into the Castle. She swept from room to room, letting her memories of innumerable weekend visits guide her, until she arrived at a display of Renaissance jewelry; there she snatched up a sapphire-encrusted Italian reliquary, turned on her heel, and ran back the way she had come.

Once outside, she ran up the wall and onto the roof of the Castle proper; then, after a moment's pause to gather her courage, she repeated the process with the flaming wall of the West Tower. This done, she knelt down by the top of the Tower roof (as her knee touched the blazing-hot tile, she sent up a silent prayer of thanks that Zatanna had thought to heatproof her costume), lowered the reliquary, and started drilling.

It was, she was uncomfortably aware, a race against time on several levels. She had to reduce the entire roof to dust before the Tower collapsed under her, before the silver reliquary absorbed so much heat from the surrounding air that she couldn't hold it even with her gloves, and (panic whispered to her) before the smoke from the fire suffocated her. Just knowing all that would have scared her enough – but, ironically, her being a speedstress actually made matters worse. An ordinary person, sitting on top of a building thats structural integrity was slowly deteriorating, would have felt only an occasional lurch of the surface beneath her; Sarah, with her Speed Force-heightened senses, was aware of every miniscule downward movement the tower made.

She swallowed (not that there was any fluid left in her mouth), and fixed her eyes on the Madonna and Child engraved on the base of the reliquary. "Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary," she whispered, "that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my mother. To thee I come, before thee I stand sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer me. Amen. Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary…"

Over the course of the next 30 seconds, 231 of the most earnest Memorares ever prayed were offered to the Virgin from the top of the North Tower. And it would seem that they did some good, since, at the end of those 30 seconds, Sarah found herself standing on the North Tower gutter, with the reliquary still in her hand; what remained of the roof was blowing away on the wind, and she had neither fallen nor choked to death.

With a surge of girlish piety, she kissed the air above the Madonna's face (taking care not to let her lips actually touch the silver) and tossed the reliquary gently into the bushes below. Then she sped through the hole she had just formed, ran down the wall into the West Tower itself, and started snatching up everything she could find that the fire hadn't already ruined. She filled her arms with as many paintings, woodcarvings, ivories, and pieces of lacquer and enamel that she could carry; then she raced back up the Tower wall, came down the outside wall, and dropped the collection at Mrs. Smith's feet. Then, after a pause for breath too brief for the normal human eye to notice it, she headed back for more.

All totaled, she managed to make four trips into the West Tower, and save some two dozen works of art, before the groans of the wall under her feet warned her that the Tower was nearing collapse, and that further trips would be unwise. Sure enough, as she slowed to a halt and dropped her last load on the pile, she heard a sickening crunch and a shout from the firefighters; turning around, she saw the once-proud Tower detach from the rest of the roof and topple to the street below (which, fortunately, had already been cordoned off and cleared).

As the firefighters rearranged themselves to deal with it, Sarah turned back to Mrs. Smith and sighed. "I'm sorry I couldn't do more," she said. "Like I said, I'm really a beginner at this stuff…"

"Not at all, my dear," said Mrs. Smith. "You've done more than anyone could possibly have asked. I only wish I knew your real name, so I could tell your parents what a marvelous young lady they've raised."

Sarah flushed happily. "Well, thanks," she murmured. "And, speaking of parents, I should probably be getting home now."

"Oh, of course," said Mrs. Smith. "Take care. And thank you again."

Sarah nodded, then turned northward and was gone in the blink of an eye.

* * *

It was only after she had arrived back in her bedroom (after pausing by a riverbank to wash the ash off her face), changed into her ordinary clothes, and curled up in her bed once more, that the reality of what she had just done sank in. She, who had never in her life done anything more exciting than finish third in a diocesan spelling bee, had just thrown herself repeatedly into the heart of a raging fire to save her city's art treasures from certain destruction.

She realized that she was trembling – whether from excitement or from retrospective terror, she couldn't say. Either way, she knew she had to get it under control before someone saw her.

Sure enough, no sooner had she taken a few deep breaths and managed to calm down somewhat (though she still felt oddly light-headed) than she heard her younger brother's voice calling, "Hey, Sarah!"

"Yes, Jeremy, what is it?" she called back, doing her best to keep her voice steady.

Since it was her brother's wont to interpret "Yes, what is it?" as meaning "Please come into my room", she was hardly surprised when her door swung open and a twelve-year-old whirlwind of energy came charging in. "Guess what just came on the TV?" said Jeremy eagerly. "There was this big fire at the Castle, and Mrs. Smith was on a special news flash talking about everything that was going to be ruined when…"

"Yeah, I heard," said Sarah. "It was on the radio."

"Oh." Jeremy seemed slightly disappointed, but his enthusiasm was in no way diminished. "Well, isn't it cool about that girl Sparkle? I mean, the way she was just zipping in and out of that burning tower… wow!"

Sarah shrugged. "It's a good thing she was there, I guess," she said. "I thought it was pretty pathetic, though, the way she needed to use one of the exhibits to grind a hole in the roof. If it had been the Flash, he could have just run through it."

Jeremy rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on, Sarah," he said. "I know you don't respect any superheroes except the Flash, but still…"

"That's not true," said Sarah. "I respect the Elongated Man."

"Any superheroes except the Flash and his friends," Jeremy amended. "Anyway, you've still got to admit that it's pretty cool to have another super-fast person out there – especially when she's almost the same age as you are. I mean, she could be in one of your classes at Padre Pio! Isn't that just creepy?"

Sarah shrugged again. "A little bit, maybe," she said. "But I already knew that every man I passed on the street could be the Flash, so what's the big deal?"

Jeremy narrowed his eyes. "You're jealous, aren't you?"

Sarah blinked. "What?"

"I'll bet you are," said Jeremy. "You've always wanted to have the Flash's powers, and now this other girl's got them instead of you. So you won't admit she's any good, because you're jealous of her."

Sarah sighed. "Good grief, Jeremy," she said, "can't I have opinions without having ulterior motives? I'm happy for Sparkle. I hope she saves a lot of people. I'm just not inclined to go join her fan club. Okay?"

Jeremy grinned. "Sure, Sarah, sure," he said. "I'll go call Dr. Moyo now."

This reference to the Palmers' family optometrist baffled Sarah completely. "Dr. Moyo?" she said. "What's he got to do with anything?"

"Well, you're going to need contact lenses pretty soon," said Jeremy. "Otherwise, we won't recognize you with those green eyes."

And with a convulsive giggle, as though this strained witticism was the cleverest thing anybody except G. K. Chesterton had ever said, he darted from the room. Sarah let out a long breath, picked up _Spiritual Mountaineers _again, and settled back down onto her pillow.

"This," she murmured reflectively, "is going to be an interesting month."


	7. Reactions

"What do you mean, nobody got pictures?" Maxwell Kihara demanded. "Here we had reporters swarming all over the place, and this never-before-seen metanthrope zooms up and asks if she can help fight the fire, and _nobody thought to take a picture of her?_"

"Well, Boss, you've got to understand how quick it all went," said Liz Wolfram. "I mean, she just came out of nowhere, and she only spent a few seconds talking to Smith…"

"That ought to be more than enough time to snap a shutter," Kihara retorted.

"Ordinarily, yes," Wolfram admitted, "but I think we were all a little nonplussed by seeing a girl there when we expected to see the Flash. You know, it takes a few seconds to adapt your brain to that, and then to think, 'Oh, yeah, I ought to take a picture…'"

Kihara groaned, and ran his hands through his hair. "Dear God in Heaven, what is the _Picture-News_ coming to?" he said. "When I was a cub back in the '50s, a _Picture-News_ reporter's camera was practically part of his body. We whipped them out and took fifteen snapshots of anything that looked remotely newsworthy, without even bothering to get our conscious minds involved. That was what made us the envy of photojournalists worldwide; 'The Eyes and Ears of the Midwest', they called us."

"Yes, sir, I understand that," said Wolfram. "But…"

"And now," her editor continued, betraying no indication that he was either aware of, or interested in, her attempted comment, "this young woman who fancies herself a worthy heir to that tradition comes into my office and tells me, if you please, that Central City's newest heroine materialized right in front of her, and she couldn't even be bothered to take a picture." Fifty years' worth of outraged pride blazed in his dark-brown eyes. "I should just call up Heat Wave and have him burn the place down right now, you know that?"

Wolfram swallowed. "Yes, sir," she said. "I'm sorry, sir. I'll try to do better. We all will."

Kihara sank back in his chair, suddenly deflated. "Go on, get out of here," he said.

Wolfram nodded and scurried out of the office, and Kihara spun his chair around and gazed up wistfully at the wallful of historic articles and images behind him. He remained in this position for several minutes, until he heard a gentle tapping on his office door, and, craning his neck around, saw Iris West Allen poking her head inside. "Knock-knock," she said with a smile. "I've got that riverboat story you wanted, Max."

Kihara returned her smile with a quiet one of his own. "Thanks, Iris," he said, and spun his chair around to take the sheaf of pages from the _Picture-News _veteran.

"I met Liz Wolfram on the way in here," Allen said conversationally. "You must have really done a number on her; she was still trembling."

Kihara snorted. "That piece of fluff would tremble at anything," he said. "So would most of the rest of the new staff. They don't make reporters like you anymore, Iris."

"Flatter me all you want, Max," said Allen. "You still won't get an Inside-the-Ice-Fortress exclusive out of me."

"No, I mean it," said Kihara. "You're just about my last remaining link with prouder days. Time was, we had a whole breed of girl reporters like you: tough, brassy, confident women who would chew through barbed wire to get the stories they believed in, and could give as good as they got when it came time to face the editor. And now the only people I can get to cover the top stories are scared little kittens like Liz Wolfram. Honestly, what's happened to the newspaper business?"

Allen shrugged. "The brassy, confident wire-chewers decided they'd rather write blogs than deal with editors," she said. "I can't blame them. If I were twenty years old again and knew a macro from a smiley, I'd probably do the same thing."

Kihara shot her a look out of the corner of his eye. "Well, you're just full of good cheer this evening, aren't you?" he said.

Allen laughed. "Sorry, Max," she said. "I forgot: never say the word 'blogs' in Maxwell Kihara's office. Tell you what, just to make it up to you, I'll get you that picture of Sparkle that the Wolfram types let you down on."

Kihara shook his head. "No, Iris, you don't have to do that," he said. "A Kihara honors his word. I told you when you came back on that I wouldn't make you cover Flash stories."

"Of course you did," said Allen. "But you never said anything about Sparkle stories."

"That was implied," said Kihara. "No Flash stuff, no Flash-substitute stuff. It's the least I can do, after everything you've been through."

Allen leaned across the desk and pointed a half-inch fingernail at her editor. "Now listen here, Max," she said. "You were just talking about how much you missed the old brassy, self-confident kind of girl reporter. Well, this brassy, self-confident girl reporter is telling you that you are going to have a picture of Sparkle on your desk, with the Iris West Allen byline on it, by this time next week. Now stop complaining and start looking grateful."

And she turned and strode out of the office, leaving Kihara alone to wonder whether a staff of scared kittens was such a curse, after all.

* * *

"Sparkle," said Captain Cold reflectively. He let the word hang in the air for a long moment, and then said, "Well, I suppose it's better than 'Kid Flash'."

"So what are we going to do about her?" said the Trickster. "Personally, I say we should set a trap and lure her in. I was working out a scheme as I came over here…"

Captain Cold raised a hand. "Now, James, there's no need to get ahead of ourselves," he said. "We don't know yet whether she's enough of a threat to merit such drastic measures."

"Cap, I was there," said the Trickster. "Trust me, this girl's the real deal. Anyone who could dive into a blazing fire like that…"

"Oh, I don't doubt that she has courage," said Captain Cold. "What I'm wondering about is her staying power. I've seen dozens of people who had the nerves, the skills, and the powers to be among our greatest enemies just run out of energy after their first feat of heroism. The same way that I've seen people who would have made excellent Rogues just lose interest after the Flash had locked them up once or twice."

The Trickster hesitated. He respected the Captain's judgment, of course – all the Rogues did – but he was pretty sure that Sparkle wasn't the type to fade away that easily. "Well, okay, Cap," he said, "but, even if you're right, shouldn't we at least stage some sort of crime as a test for her? Something where, if she is the real deal, she wouldn't be able to resist intervening?"

"We certainly should," said Captain Cold, "but, if you'll forgive my saying so, James, it shouldn't be one of _your_ crimes. Your mind just works too deviously; this is a job for one of the more straightforward Rogues – Harkness, perhaps, or Rathaway. Give her a simple bank robbery to foil – don't confuse her with the umpteen twists and turns and new gadgets you wouldn't be able to resist throwing in – and then, if she doesn't swoop to the rescue, we'll know she was just a flash in the pan."

The Trickster was forced to acknowledge the logic of this. Still, he was crestfallen – and he also felt a pang of anticipatory resentment towards Captain Boomerang or the Pied Piper, or whichever unsubtle Rogue the Captain would end up tapping for the job. There he was, the rightful heir of Jesse James, the great modern American outlaw, and he would just have to sit and watch as one of those simple-minded clowns got to be the first criminal apprehended by Sparkle. It wasn't fair.

_Excuse me?_ said the rational part of his mind. _Not fair? It might not be fair to Captain Boomerang, because he's going to be in jail and you'll be free – but just how exactly is it unfair to _you_, Mr. Jesse?_

_Well, he might actually beat her… _the rest of him argued.

_That wasn't what you were thinking a second ago, _said Rational. _You were thinking it was unfair that he would get arrested by Sparkle and you wouldn't. Now, honestly, do you think Jesse James ever thought that about Allan Pinkerton?_

The Trickster had to admit that it didn't make much sense. Still, it was how he felt. He wasn't sure why; desire for historical distinction probably had something to do with it ("In her first struggle against Captain Cold's Rogues, Sparkle successfully overcame the wiles of James 'Trickster' Jesse"), but he was pretty sure that wasn't all of it. There was something about the new speedstress in silver that made being captured by her seem more exciting than escaping from the Flash; whether it was novelty, mystery, or something else entirely, he didn't know, but there it was.

He became aware that Captain Cold had already left the room – presumably to make his plans for the Great Sparkle-Testing Bank Robbery. He rose from his chair, activated the air jets on his shoes, and drifted out of the hideout, softly humming "Hotter Than a Two-Dollar Pistol" to himself as he went.

* * *

The Flash vibrated through the door of the Madison Hotel's Room 212 and came to rest at the foot of the bed, his arms folded and his face as stern as he could manage. "All right, Zee," he said. "Care to do some explaining?"

Zatanna glanced up from her copy of _Playbill_ and arched an eyebrow. "You know, Flash," she said, "it's generally considered polite to knock before entering a lady's room. Or at least to open the door."

The Flash ignored her. "I was just listening to the Central-Keystone evening news on WBLH," he said, using the common League nickname for Oracle, "and about the only thing the anchors could talk about was this teenage speedstress who saved the Castle's African collection this afternoon. Sparkle, they called her."

"Really?" said Zatanna. "Well, that's a nice name. Not the best I've ever heard – I've always been rather fond of 'Green Lantern', truth be told – but…"

"Zee," said the Flash, "yesterday morning you were trapped in a statue in Central City. By your own admission, the person who freed you was a girl about fifteen years old. Today, a girl about fifteen shows up in Central City with the power of the Speed Force. Now, you want to look me in the eye and tell me that's a coincidence?"

Zatanna sighed. "I told her you'd react this way," she said.

"How do you expect me to react?" the Flash demanded. "If I wanted to, I could go back in time and arrange for Leonardo da Vinci to have a few extra kids, so there were half a hundred people walking around with that backwards-words power of yours. But that wouldn't be fair to you, so I don't do it. I figured you'd at least be polite enough to return the favor."

"Flash, you don't understand," said Zatanna. "This girl freed me from a magical prison. If I hadn't granted her some favor in return, my powers would have started to ebb away within the hour – and your speed was the only thing she could think of that she really wanted. You should take it as a compliment: it means she admires you and wants to be like you."

"I think you're the one who doesn't understand, Zee," said the Flash. "The last thing I need is an obsessive fan running around C.C. with my powers. If you'd ever been the major superhero in a place, you'd know what I mean – or even if you'd ever read that one Stephen King book…"

A faint smile played around Zatanna's lips. "I think I know what you mean anyway, Flash," she said. "I also think you're doing Sparkle a great disservice. I know I'm not as good at reading people as Batman or J'onn, but I can at least recognize basic goodness of heart when I see it. If the girl I met yesterday is a stalker or a John-Hinckley type, then I'm Despero."

The Flash hesitated. "You're sure about that?"

Zatanna nodded. "Give her a chance, Flash," she said. "She's not trying to steal your limelight, and she doesn't have any designs on your personal well-being. She just wants a chance to do what her hero does for a little while." Her smile broadened, and added, "In a way, she reminds me of a young man your predecessor once told me about. It seems there was this boy in Blue Valley who was head of the Flash Fan Club there, and he…"

"Okay, okay, I get the point," said the Flash. "Have it your way. But if…" He trailed off, as a phrase that Zatanna had just used belatedly revealed its significance to him. "Hang on… what do you mean, 'for a little while'?"

"Just what I said," said Zatanna, her smile broadening yet further. "Sparkle agreed to a time limit. At the end of thirty days, her connection with the Speed Force will expire, and she'll go back to being a perfectly ordinary Ohio teenager."

"Well, why didn't you say that in the first place?" said the Flash. "I wouldn't have been worried about her, if I had known she was that reasonable."

Zatanna rolled her eyes. If the Flash's own powers had been suddenly found to have an expiration date attached, he would, she felt certain, have fallen into a positive tizzy of despair. Yet this other young woman only became "reasonable" when he learned that she had agreed to just such a condition. Superhuman powers, she reflected, were no guarantee against quintessentially human foibles.

"Thirty days, huh?" said the Flash. "Just until the beginning of May, then. I wonder if we'll run into each other."

"Probably," said Zatanna. "The two Fastest People Alive, living practically next door to each other for almost a month? I don't see how you could avoid it."

The Flash nodded. "Yeah, I guess you're right," he said. "But will we hit it off? That's the real question."

Zatanna shrugged, and returned her attention to her magazine. "That I wouldn't dare to guess," she said. "You'll just have to wait and see."

The Flash sighed. "I hate waiting."

* * *

Somewhere in the depths of the Speed Force, the personality imprint that was all that the mortal realm retained of Barry Allen stirred. "Do you feel that, Atalanta?" it – he – said. "Another of our race has touched the Source. A girl, by the feel of it."

Another personality imprint, immeasurably more ancient, roused the remaining wisps of itself into some semblance of coherence, and hearkened. "So it seems," it – she – replied. "Well, what of it? These things will happen from time to time."

"Yes, but this is different," said Dr. Allen's ghost. "Her transformation doesn't seem to be lasting, as yours and mine were. There's something strange about it; it reminds me of a woman I knew, when I was a living man and served with the other heroes of my era."

"Well, and if so?" said Atalanta. "Let the living contact the Source however they choose; what difference does it make to us? What difference does anything make to such as we?"

"None, perhaps," Dr. Allen conceded. "But I wonder what the Hunter will do when it learns of this new development."

There was a pause, then, as Atalanta's all-but-deteriorated "mind" processed that thought. "Oh," she said at length. "Oh, I see. Yes, that is an interesting question indeed."

"The girl should be warned," said Dr. Allen. "She probably has no idea of the danger awaiting her; she should have some chance to protect herself."

"Perhaps," said Atalanta, "but how can we warn her? Being what we are, we cannot leave the Source, and she can scarcely learn in time how to come here. Unless the gods work a wonder for her, she would seem to be at the Hunter's mercy."

"I'm not sure about that," said Dr. Allen thoughtfully. "If I spend a good while building up my strength, I might be able to impress myself on the Source-aware part of her subconscious mind. I just might be able, that way, to give her the knowledge she needs to survive."

Atalanta's own strength was beginning to ebb, and her voice became fainter as she slowly unraveled back into semi-nothingness. "Well," she said, "if you must, go ahead."

"I think I will," said Dr. Allen. "After all, I was a hero once; it would be disrespectful to my own memory if I didn't at least try to save an innocent girl from certain doom."

There was no reply, and Dr. Allen turned his attention to the laborious business of absorbing and storing the energy of the Speed Force. It would take him, he estimated, about nineteen of the material world's days to gather the strength his plan required. There was no time to be lost.

* * *

Sarah Palmer knelt beside her bed, oblivious to the turmoil she was causing in the minds of newspaper editors, criminal masterminds, superheroes, and Speed-Force ghosts. "Now I lay me down to sleep," she whispered. "I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Guide me safely through the night, and bless me with the morning light. Amen."

She crossed herself, pressed the "Play" button on her tape recorder, and crawled into bed. As the opening strains of "The Music Is You" began (Sarah had always found John Denver soothing to fall asleep to), she snuggled under the covers and smiled to herself. "Well, that's one down," she murmured. "Only twenty-nine to go."


	8. Yellow Kryptonite Flambé

**Day 4: April 11, 2003**

"Hey, Sarah, wait up!"

Sarah jerked her hand out of the nearby modernistic sculpture and whirled around. "Hey, Dixie," she said. "How come you're heading this way? I thought you were staying with your aunt on Larch Street while your mom was in the hospital."

"Mom got home yesterday," said Dixie Haney, in the unconscious drawl, so incongruous in a girl who had never left Ohio, that had earned her her nickname. (Her real name was Rachel Veronica, but nobody ever called her that except a few distant relatives who rarely saw her.) "She never takes as long to recover as the doctors think she will."

"Oh," said Sarah. "Well, that's good."

"How 'bout you?" said Dixie. "What were you doing making love to Old Rusty like that?"

Sarah flushed; she hadn't realized she'd been so conspicuous. "I don't know," she said. "Just lost track of where I was, I guess." (In fact, she had been practicing vibrating her hand through the metal; for the past three days, she had been diligently honing her various powers whenever she saw a chance.)

Dixie's blue-gray eyes narrowed in concern. "Sarah, are you sure you're feeling okay lately?" she said. "Seems like you've been acting a little bit out of it this whole week."

"Have I?" said Sarah, trying to ignore her heart as it suddenly went into overdrive. "I hadn't noticed."

"Well, I've noticed," said Dixie. "That's a best friend's job, to notice stuff like that. And I'm telling you, you haven't been yourself lately. Dr. Graham'll ask you for something, and it'll be like you didn't even hear him – or you'll jump five miles into the air because a bird suddenly flew out of a tree – or you'll… well, all the stuff you've been doing these last few days. If it was someone like Tammy, I wouldn't think twice about it, but, coming from you, it makes me worried."

Sarah could understand that. She'd been aware, in a vague way, that her new awareness of all kinds of motion had required some getting used to (it was one thing to know, in the abstract, that your planet was rotating, but to actually feel it was another matter), but she'd been hoping no-one would catch on. Still, if Dixie was the only one… and the reference to Tammy Wu had given her an idea. "Yeah, well," she said, doing her best to sound shyly coy, "we all get snared eventually, don't we?"

For a second or two, Dixie didn't get it; then – "Snared?" she said, with sudden relish. "As in… _heart_-snared?" (The way she drew out her vowels made this concept sound much more salacious than it really was.)

Sarah forced a giggle. "Yeah, that's it," she said. "I didn't want to say anything until he'd actually looked at me at least once, but, since you've already caught me…" She shrugged, as if to suggest that there was no keeping secrets from the gimlet eye of Dixie Haney.

The Gimlet-Eyed One was still shaking her head in wonder. "Well, what d'you know," she said. "Sarah Palmer, of all people. You talk about yellow Kryptonite flambé…"

Sarah grinned, and nodded. "Yes, indeed."

Of course, many of those reading this do not, and never have, talked about yellow Kryptonite flambé, and may be wondering why Dixie assumes that they do. For their benefit, it should be explained that "yellow Kryptonite flambé" is, in superhero-conscious areas such as Central City, a common idiomatic way of describing romantic love, the idea being that it is the one thing that absolutely everyone is vulnerable to. Up until now, the phrase had always driven Sarah bananas (she being the sort of person who does not find romantic love particularly irresistible, and who has little patience for people who talk mush about it), but, on this occasion, it seemed to her just the phrase that was needed. Of course, if the least romantically inclined girl in Padre Pio High suddenly starts acting weird, it must be because she's in love. Why would you ever need another explanation? Yellow Kryptonite flambé, after all.

"So who is he?" said Dixie eagerly.

"I'm not going to tell you."

"Oh, come on! You've got to tell me. Or at least give me a hint of some kind. Come on, what's the first letter of his name?"

Sarah shook her head, her lips shut ostentatiously tight. "Sorry, Dixie," she said. "If I tell _all_ my secrets, I won't have any aura of mystery left to beguile him with. You'll just have to figure it out on your own."

She saw the sparkle come into Dixie's eyes, and realized, too late, that she had made a tactical error. Nosiness had always been Dixie's besetting sin; she had gotten in trouble on at least two occasions for sneaking around the school chapel, trying to overhear people's confessions. The last thing she needed was encouragement to try and unearth the secret that Sarah was now keeping.

On the other hand, she probably would have tried to do that anyway – and at least now she thought it was a secret crush, not a secret identity. So things could have been worse – but, all the same, Sarah was uneasy. If she should slip, and Dixie should find out something she oughtn't…

Sarah shuddered quietly at the thought. Not for herself, so much; she was a superheroine now – for a little while, at least – and superheroes were like fools and children, so far as being looked after went. But the idea of Dixie – sweet, funny, guileless Dixie – meeting the sort of fate that people who found out superheroes' secret identities always did seem to meet… that was another thing. For a brief moment, she almost wished she had thought of something else to ask Zatanna for.

Then the moment passed, and she was herself again. _Oh, relax, Sarah, _she thought. _Even if Dixie does find you out, it's not as though she's going to run off and tell Captain Cold at the first chance she gets. She'd have to make her own huge mistake before anybody even suspected that she knew anything – and two huge mistakes in one month is a little much to ask for, don't you think?_

Thus reassured, she dropped gratefully back into giggly-schoolgirl mode, and spent a few more minutes bantering with Dixie about her mysterious flame. Then they reached the intersection of 16th and Elm, and Dixie turned down the latter street to her home, bidding Sarah goodbye with her standard kiss and wave of her right index and middle fingers. Sarah smiled, and headed on down 16th Street to her own house.

* * *

She was about two blocks away when she heard a strange whirling noise above her, and felt a shadow fall across her face. She looked up, and saw what appeared to be a giant, silver cat's head made up of about a hundred tiny propellers, travelling slowly across the sky like a flock of highly synchronized geese.

She recognized the design instantly, of course. Everyone in Central City knew it; it was the logo for the local baseball team, the Central City Cheetahs. But she was, at first, at a loss to determine what it was doing up there. Was this the manager's bizarre way of promoting next Saturday's home game with the Minneapolis Twins? But no, that didn't make sense; he would have used green and yellow, the team's official colors, not silver…

And it was at this point that she noticed two significant facts. In the first place, the color of the aerial emblem was a very close match (an astonishingly close match, considering that there hadn't been any pictures in the newspaper yet) of the color of her own Sparkle costume. And, in the second place, when she looked at the "propellers" a little more closely, she realized that they weren't propellers at all. They had only looked like propellers because they were pointed, and spun round and round in midair – and, of course, because no-one ever expects to see a hundred synchronized boomerangs flying over her city.

Sarah stood stock-still for a full minute. She knew a challenge when she saw one – but, if she accepted, there was no going back. Any superhero who took on one Rogue in battle, whether she succeeded or not, automatically became the enemy of the Rogues as a whole. Was she really ready for that, after only four days?

Yes, she was. She had to be. She had no idea what Captain Boomerang was planning; for all she knew, hundreds of innocent people could be at risk. She didn't dare let cowardice get the better of her now.

She took a deep breath, crossed herself, and turned and ran like lightning toward Meredith Field.


End file.
